


every hit a lesson

by Apricot



Series: The Good Lived Yesterday [2]
Category: DC Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Enemies to Friends, F/M, Pre-Justice League (2017), Pre-Relationship, Relationship Study, Stale Cinnamon Roll Diana Prince
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-09 11:50:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11103999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apricot/pseuds/Apricot
Summary: War always had a cost. Diana knew what it took to pay it. Deep in her heart, she wondered if the Batman found the bill as dear as she had.(A series of vignettes in which Diana watches the world change.)





	every hit a lesson

**Author's Note:**

> _"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."_ — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
> 
> Thanks so much to RandomTiger for the beta!

As man’s world healed, she found a small, unassuming place in it.

Nothing felt like her real home, but there were places she felt comfortable, if not entirely herself. All of them were established somewhere on the European continent. Watching the people rebuild their cities, watching them slowly lose that haunted look around their eyes, felt like its own kind of healing.

That wasn’t to say that she didn’t explore. She spent a few years touring America, visiting the languid stretch of the West coast before making her way to the busy, burgeoning Eastern cities. There was something about the people there that felt consistently locked in a struggle to discard the past and attain the new. The United States had made youth and modernity its national currency.

It was initially refreshing. But Diana found herself returning back to countries that felt more comfortable with their own history. She’d forever be a tourist in a man’s world, but at least those places had a hint of familiarity.

 

* * *

 

The Wayne name was first recognizable after the double-murder that made headlines even in Europe, thanks to the Wayne’s billionaire status. She had read the story and felt a twinge in her heart when she’d looked at the photograph of the young boy (smiling shyly in a school uniform) that had accompanied one of the many articles that had popped up in the wake of the tragedy.

The boy had faded from her mind as the decade had worn on, though. There were so many acts of senseless violence, so much tragedy, that it was impossible to remember all of the faces. She’s stopped trying a long time ago.

 

* * *

 

The cities of this world were expanding so fast that Diana could barely recognize them as the years passed. Farms turned to towns, towns to city centers, and then those city centers grew tall as mankind chose to expand into the air. She watched buildings grow high enough to touch clouds.

Time, which seemed to go so slowly the first few decades, began to ramp up exponentially as the world changed. As if it was racing toward something.

 

* * *

 

It was on one of her infrequent work trips to the States that she saw Bruce Wayne again.

His face was once more in print—this time, a tabloid, the boy grown into a tall, broad-shouldered man. His grin was wide and white and his arm was slung around a woman’s waist, who had her hands raised to shield her face from the cameras.

Bruce Wayne did not. All trace of the shy smile was gone. Bruce Wayne smiled right back in the photograph and by default, the viewer: pleased, lazy, and a little sly.

 _He looks supremely arrogant_ , Diana thought. Even for a man.

 

* * *

 

Diana rarely visited Gotham, except for when her work took her there. If she was required for multiple days, she always tried to stay in the neighboring city of Metropolis, with its clean light and open skyline. There was something about the gray shadow of the other city that saddened her, even viewed through her hotel room window across the bay.

Gotham was perpetually downwind from Metropolis, a repository of smoke and storm clouds that drifted away from the City of Tomorrow. That arrangement would feel unfair, if Gotham didn’t seem to prefer it that way.

Gotham languished in crumbling architecture and a crime wave that spanned years. She preferred cities that held onto their past, but Gotham held onto a nightmare of its own making. It added to its reputation urban legends that would have been the envy of her sword-sister Calliope, if Diana could have found a way to tell her of them.

Most of the stories she wrote off as fanciful or a quirk of the locals. But Gotham refused to let its horrors remain completely in shadow, and the details that seeped out were too specific to be entirely fiction—mutant, scaled beasts that prowled the sewers, fire demons, psychopathic clowns.

Above everything, there was the story of the Batman, who the police refused to confirm or deny the actual existence of. Diana almost smiled when she heard that the city had produced its own type of defender, its own version of justice. It was a graceful twist.

 

* * *

 

It’s at a benefit for the Star City Historical Society that Diana first saw Bruce Wayne in person. Her date—a colleague with the foundation, nothing more, even though she can tell by certain opaque overtures he’d certainly welcome _more—_ was doing the service of pointing out some of the more wealthy donors.

“And that’s the CEO of Wayne Enterprises—“

The name _Wayne_ triggered her response, not because of the tabloid photo, but because she remembered those news articles nearly 30 years ago.

“Bruce Wayne?”

They’re too far to be heard, but Bruce Wayne and the woman on his arm—too young to be the one in the magazine, certainly—turned slightly and she could see his profile from across the room.

He was a bit older now, but the smile was the same. She watched him for a moment.

The smile felt more vacant here than in the photograph, but there was something cool behind his eyes, Diana decided, that wasn’t captured by the tabloid or by other photos she’d seen—it was something older, wearier, and much more dangerous.

It didn’t concern her. She’d watched powerful men throughout the century. Nearly all had been dangerous. Most were also cruel. Bruce Wayne is nothing more than the latest version of them, if made accidentally more virtuous by his lack of ambition.

“Did you want to meet him?” her date asked, raising an eyebrow.

She considered that for a moment, and then shook her head.

They left shortly after that. Her date offered to share a ride home, but she only smiled and politely thanked him before taking her own cab.

 

* * *

 

The rise of the information age made it much more difficult to hide.

The world, which had been so vast when she’d first arrived, got smaller every day. She’d coped by moving from city to city over the years, spending the past five in Manila, then another six in Volos within the past decade. Her relocation to Paris this year had been the trickiest yet; her job, at least, gave her reason enough to travel. She’d found that she could stay longer in a place if the people around her didn’t find the day-to-day very familiar.

She wasn’t the only one affected. She monitored the news almost unconsciously, building the habit first to understand this world, and later on to keep her connection to it.

In the beginning, there was very little about the Batman. It was more rumor, speculation, urban legend. But with the internet, even the newspapers that had refused to dignify the Batman phenomena with comment couldn’t filter out the occasional story or conspiracy theory. It became impossible to completely deny. And then the rumors began to build.

Sometimes, late at night, she’d do some researching—hungry for any news that could point to there being others like her, outsiders from the world of men. The chatrooms, and later websites, argued everything from the Batman’s mission, to immortal status, to speculation on his secret identity. She skimmed a 40-page manifesto on someone’s theory that he wasn’t of Earth at all, before she’d dismissed it as pure fantasy. Another commentator insisted that there were actually multiple Batmen that formed a vigilante militia, spanning all along the Blüdhaven-Gotham Corridor.

Strangely enough, it’s this theory that’s partially proven the night the Gotham News Network announced one of the Batmen had been killed—beaten to death in an alley.

The world felt a little more bleak and colorless after that, and Diana stopped her late-night researching on the Batman. What snippets of news she heard from Gotham confirmed her decision: sightings of the Batman were still reported, but his methods were far more aggressive. Where there were once witness accounts and scared cons became a network of silence, brutal assaults that sent dozens to the hospital and a convicted child-rapist into a coma, and an official statement from the Gotham Police Department that finally denounced any connection or sanctions of vigilante behavior.

Batman became whisper and rumor. A ghost story told to tourists, and a bad nightmare for anyone who lived in Gotham.

War always had a cost. Diana knew what it took to pay it. Deep in her heart, she wondered if the Batman found the bill as dear as she had.

 

* * *

 

She was being hunted.

Diana didn’t know who had found her, or what clue she’d left behind that had given her away. She could’ve been paranoid. But a warrior needed to trust her instincts, and so she did.

The clues were subtle at first, but they’re there: a car that lingered a little too long, following her path around the arrondissement. A pointed inquiry from a potential client she’d never heard of before, at one of her old addresses. Files at her work office that had been subtly shifted, although everything else had remained in place. And then the photograph— _the_ photograph—one of the few mementos she’d kept safe all these years—goes missing from her safe.

Superman had made it apparent that there were those in the world with extraordinary abilities. It wasn’t much of a mental leap to assume that if there was one person like that, there could have been more.

The world had gotten too small for her to hide now, that much was clear. She’d been as careful as she could, but it hadn’t been enough. Someone had come looking, and they’d found her.

She considered disappearing again. She could manage it, but this world—this ever-changing world with its cameras, its facial recognition, its electronic banking—had made it almost impossible. They had her digital footprint, logged and available for review. And skulking around in the shadows like a fugitive wasn’t her style.

She needed to take care of the information herself, or at least determine what they had on her so she could change her patterns before they’d learn anything more.

The same connections were good enough to review her information and found a lead, buried deep.

It’s not one person. Worse: it’s a corporation. And it can’t be a coincidence that both Superman and it were based near Metropolis..

The Black Zero Event—as it had been coined in the American media—had left the world shocked. Superman, so impervious to criticism in the first few years after he’d revealed himself, had been called into question now that humanity had the first taste that not _all_ super-powered beings might not be as benevolent.

Sometimes it felt like the only thing man’s world loved more than hurting each other was assigning the blame for it afterward. Diana wasn’t sticking around to be swept up into that, or to hang around the sidelines. She’d already spent years watching the evils borne of mankind. They didn’t need any help from her.

Her mission was to slip whatever noose LexCorp was tying for her. That was all.

 

* * *

 

Lex Luthor was another man with too much power and too little humility.

And a poor grasp of myth that he’d twisted for his own justifications, if she understood his little speeches correctly.

(She could see the influence of the gods in his eyes. But it wasn’t Prometheus, light-bringer, that she read. The madness of Ares was written in every line of his face.)

 

* * *

 

_Who are you?_

_Where have you been?_

One thing was clear: Bruce Wayne was far more than he first appeared to be.

Oh, she hadn’t been wrong about the arrogance. Or the fact that he was still a dangerous man. But she’d been wrong to discount his ambitions.

Her contacts had tried to break into Luthor’s data encryption, but the code was military-grade and beyond their skills. And here was a spoiled playboy who had done it within a few hours of her returning the drive to him. That evidence—not to mention her observations of the man in person—pointed to some very interesting conclusions.

Which he didn’t seem to be hiding from her. She wondered it that was a gesture of trust. He knew a good part of her secret, and he’d handed her the clues to one of his own.

For the first time in a very long time, she was curious.

 

* * *

 

War was coming.

Bruce’s words had felt like an ill-timed prophesy, but deep in her bones she knew that there was truth in it. Something had been building over the years, in the hearts of men. In every super-powered weapon they’d developed, in every attempt of their scientists to reach higher into the stars.

She wanted the Batman to be wrong. But she had a feeling he wasn’t wrong often. Worse, the man knew that.

He was currently coming to terms with the death of the Man of Steel. The world was. She was coming to terms with her own decision.

There had been a part of her that had thrilled to be in the heat of battle once more. War was loss and pain, it was watching good people, _friends,_ die. But that wasn’t all that it was. There was the fight, too. There was that hot rush of a well-placed hit, of a battle won, of a great foe broken at your feet. There was the stunning glory of victory.

Even now, as they mourned one of the greatest heroes the Earth had ever seen, she could remember the way she’d felt after they’d defeated that creature. It had ignited her from her toes to the top of her head, a counterpoint to the blows she’d taken. Made better by it. It reminded her of training, back home.

 _Every hit is a lesson, Diana._ Antiope’s eyes, cold and clear as the sea. _But if you take too long to learn them, you’ll die._

She’d put aside her training, her fight. She’d lost more than she’d thought because of that.

With victory, though, came more temptations: to enjoy it too much, to give herself over to the carnage and rage. To lose sight of her mercy, of justice, of hope. Of love.

But perhaps by leaving mankind, she’d done the same thing. Lost hope. Lost sight of love.

 _Philanthropist._ For some reason, it was Lex Luthor’s voice that came back to her.

_Lover of humanity._

And for love, she would pick up her sword again.

For hope, she’d fight.


End file.
